The design and creation of web portals, which comprise pages or groups of pages that allow a user to access a large number of centrally accessible applications and content, has become an increasingly complicated task. One of the more important challenges facing the developers of web portal products is the development of tools that provide easier approaches to designing and organizing web portal content. Particularly, there has been an interest in tools and forms of organization that enable sections of a portal to be developed independently, while still maintaining varying degrees of uniformity in style and presentation.
Currently, conventional tools enable the configuration of files governing presentation, but are difficult to use and unintuitive. Often, there is no centrally accessible mechanism for determining the interaction between multiple related pieces of configuration information. For example, many web portals use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for managing presentation. However, current implementations either do not allow an administrator to determine which style properties are affecting the presentation of a section or require specialized tools and editors, thus requiring multiple iterations of modification and testing before a preferred visual presentation can be achieved.
What is needed are improved techniques for modifying and editing web portal content.